This wasn’t the first time Duely had said something like this to me, but it was the first time he had mentioned things shifting the older I got. I still thought he was being dramatic and reading things into situations that weren’t there. I was done arguing that my mother, who had made my life hell from the moment my father died, was scared of me. She hated me. That was clear. She hated that I wouldn’t give her the power of three. She hated that I was stubborn and like my father. She possibly hated that I was half normal. But Persephone Kamlock was by no means scared of me. I let out a hard laugh. “It’s past time you let that theory go,” I told him.

He lowered his eyebrows in a frown. The frustrated kind, not the angry kind. He wanted me to buy into this idea of me being powerful. I had a mortal as a father. That was impossible to consider.

“Explain then why you feel a dark cast and I feel nothing? How do you know it’s dark? What is it you feel?” He was challenging me now. I didn’t have answers, of course. I was still trying to wrap my head around the disappearing act the caster had done.

“You would have felt it too if you’d seen the man,” I said in way of explanation.

“But I didn’t see him. No one did… but you,” he shot back.

I opened my mouth to remind him that I’d been walking around by myself to get peace. There was no way the man knew he’d see me out there alone. He hadn’t been waiting on me. That was ridiculous. This was getting us nowhere. Duely was done with the evening and wanted to get stoned. He wasn’t going to do much to help me. I just shook my head and turned to walk back to the house. “Maybe I’m crazy!” I called out to him, as I walked, trying to break the tension that had unintentionally built.

“Or maybe you’re darker than you want to accept,” was his response.

No, I wasn’t. If I was dark, if my soul was as cursed as my sisters and mother then I’d be like them. I would be a shallow, gold digging bitch with no real affection for anyone. I felt deeply, I cared, I loved, I had emotions they didn’t understand. I could fight off the darkness of my mother’s blood in my veins. That made me less dark than any of them. Less powerful. They had no reason to fear me.

ELEVEN: THE CIGARETTE

Eleven

The Cigarette